Technical Field
Embodiments described herein generally relate to processors. In particular, embodiments described herein generally relate to processors to process packed data operands.
Background Information
Many processors have Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures. In SIMD architectures, a packed data instruction, vector instruction, or SIMD instruction may operate on multiple data elements or multiple pairs of data elements simultaneously or in parallel. The processor may have parallel execution hardware responsive to the packed data instruction to perform the multiple operations simultaneously or in parallel.
Multiple data elements may be packed within one register or memory location as packed data or vector data. In packed data, the bits of the register or other storage location may be logically divided into a sequence of data elements. For example, a 256-bit wide packed data register may have four 64-bit wide data elements, eight 32-bit data elements, sixteen 16-bit data elements, etc. Each of the data elements may represent a separate individual piece of data (e.g., a pixel color, a component of a complex number, etc.), which may be operated upon separately and/or independently of the others.